Clicks Versus Bricks

With Merchant Solutions, you have the ability to sell hard goods (physical products you need to ship) or soft goods (downloadable products such as software, photos (JPGs), PDFs, or ebooks). If you are planning on selling a combination of hard goods and soft goods or only soft goods, you may want to be aware of a few potential issues.

Since fulfillment of soft goods happen immediately, store owners may not be able to prevent fraud orders. For downloadable products, a link to the product is presented immediately on the confirmation page at the end of the customer order process. This is unlike hard goods, where store owners are notified of the order and any flagged invalid credit card data before the fulfillment takes place. Therefore, the customer will already obtain your downloadable product before you can verify and process the order. With Merchant Solutions, the only information the customer needs to process the order is a valid credit card number. If the credit card address, expiration date, name on the credit card, or threedigit verification number on the back of the card are invalid, the order is still processed but will be flagged for further verification by the merchant. You can set up the system to automatically charge the credit card, but that still will not match the credit card number with the other customer information. If it's a true fraudulent order, you could be charging the credit card of someone who did not place the order. If you see a pattern of fraud orders, you can use the Risk Tools to block a certain IP address or a range of IP addresses from placing an order at your store. This doesn't prevent the person from going to the next coffee shop and doing the same thing, but it will sure slow them down.

Another issue that will arise if you are thinking of selling a combination of hard goods and soft goods is the confusion of shipping options. In the Shipping Manager, you can set up multiple shipping options such as express, priority, downloadable, ground, and/or air. But what happens if a customer orders a soft good and a hard good in the same order? Or if they only order a soft good? The Shipping Manager isn't smart enough to not display the other shipping options when someone orders a soft good. This can cause confusion when a customer is presented with all those options during the checkout process. They might even select the wrong shipping option and accidentally be charged extra for shipping when there is nothing to be shipped. A workaround to this issue is to manually notify the customer during the checkout process. You can add a warning message on the checkout page so the customer is aware of the shipping options, which will most likely not be read. This workaround will not dummyproof the ordering process but will somewhat reduce phone calls and tech support.